Faint Heart, Foul Lady: A Novelette: & Bonus Story: Night Life Read online

  I wanted to dismount, but it was a difficult maneuver when one was wearing mail and still clutching a lance. I was a champion at falling off horses fully armored. I didn’t enjoy demonstrating that particular skill. I handed the lance to Eudo, then rode to a nearby fallen forest giant of a tree. I gave my good horse the command to stand. The boy watched sullenly as I maneuvered myself off my horse with the aid of the log and slid to the ground.

  “Moon curse you, have you lost your wits, such as they are?” the damsel cried. “How dare you dismount when danger is all around us? Suppose the monster returns? How will you fight it from the ground?”

  Sir Wulfric puffed up then and bowed to her. “Damsel,” he said.

  “And you, you fat, worthless fool!” she cried. “What ails you? Where are all your knightly skills?”

  “Is it thus you address your deliverer?” asked Sir Wulfric.

  “My deliverer! Devils pull out your hairs one by one, fool! What had you to do with anything besides irritating the captor worm?”

  I had forgot to straighten out our story with the damsel, but then again, she didn’t seem like the sort with whom one could reason.

  “Wait,” I said to the boy. “Who are you?”

  “I am Nix of the Wilderland.”

  “I am Sir Bran of Elstan. Won’t you bide with us?”

  His frown was ferocious. “No. Somewhere I will find someone who will help me become a knight. I see no profit in staying here.”

  He had the right of that. I had no money or goods to offer him, even if he decided to accept a post as my servant. “I cannot offer you material things,” I said, “but I can instruct you in matters of chivalry. Even if one cannot be a knight, one may assume the virtues of one.”

  The boy glared at me from under the rim of his soup pot.

  “Yonder stands my savior,” cried the damsel. Nix and I glanced at her. She pointed to Nix.

  Sir Wulfric’s face took on a dark and purple hue.

  “All your knightly virtues didn’t teach you to aim a lance,” Nix said.

  I sighed. “Sadly true. Perhaps you are right. You would do well to seek someone who could teach you truer than I could.”

  “All you’ve taught me so far is that you lie when there’s not the least need.”

  “Oh, there was need,” I muttered. Sir Wulfric was a powerful knight, and not to be thwarted lightly. He craved any excuse to fight, and regarded as insults remarks which others would see as innocence.

  Sir Wulfric, sweat dotting his brow, came toward us, sword unsheathed.

  “What transpires?” screamed the damsel, rushing toward us. “Sir knight! What are your intentions?”

  Sir Wulfric turned toward her, and at that moment Eudo rode past the knight, leading his pack mules so that he separated the boy and me from Sir Wulfric.

  “I intend to see you safe from all base creatures, Damsel,” Sir Wulfric said.

  “If you mean to retreat, now would be a good time,” I murmured to the lad.

  Nix nodded and let out a whistle. His pony galloped up and the boy jumped up on the log I had used to dismount, then leapt into the pony’s saddle and galloped away.

  #

  The damsel, of course, had no mount, no palfrey, not even a hackney. She would not ride one of the pack mules. She would not ride Eudo’s rouncey. Only a destrier would do.

  The damsel managed to arrange herself on my saddle as though it were an accustomed mode of transport.

  After Eudo aided Sir Wulfric in remounting his destrier, he helped me remove my mail and store it on one of the laden pack mules. He offered me his horse, but I decided to stretch my legs. The soft spring evening was pleasant for walking, and I felt light without my hauberk.

  “What is your story, damsel?” I asked. “How did that serpent get you in its coils?”

  “I do not converse with lunatics who mean me ill.”

  “Nay, but it’s a solid question,” said Sir Wulfric. “How came you to be in such straits, and whither are you bound now, that we may help you get there?”

  “Neither do I converse with blind fat fools,” said the damsel.

  “This should make an interesting journey,” I said to Eudo, beside whose horse I walked. Even Sir Wulfric could not start a duel with a lady, no matter how rudely she behaved.

  Eudo laughed, and the damsel turned to glare at us with fire in her eyes. “Do you make sport of me?” she cried.

  “Pay us no heed; we are people with whom you do not deign to speak.”

  “I will speak with the squire, whom I hold blameless.”

  Eudo looked to his master. Sir Wulfric’s face bore purple banners in its cheeks; he snarled beneath his mustaches, but gave Eudo a curt nod.

  “How came you into trouble, maiden, and where do you desire to go now?” Eudo asked.

  “I was stolen from my older sister’s castle in the night by that creature. I thought it was a very nightmare of mine, but found I could not wake. It stole me the night before I was to secretly set out for the king’s court in search of a knight to defend my sister from a marauding knight who has laid siege to her castle and who wants to marry her. For many days I have been in the monster’s clutches, and it has defeated and devoured knight after knight who would save me.” Her head drooped. “Finally I found and lost a savior in the space of half an hour,” she murmured.

  “Where lies your sister’s castle?” Eudo asked.

  “In the north country, where the sea meets the feet of the mountains, and all the beach is cobbled stones. I wit not how far the serpent carried me, for it moved not like a horse; there was no measuring its stride. I have been in this forest a fortnight, I trow, while it went widewhere with me.”

  “Who is the knight who lays siege to your sister’s castle?” asked Eudo.

  She shuddered in the saddle. “The Knight of the Pearl,” she whispered.

  “Damsel, may we carry you home?” I asked. Bitter bile was in the back of my throat. I swallowed. “For I am fated to meet that knight. He slew my father.”

  Crimson touched her cheeks. “Why did you try to kill me, knave?”

  “I didn’t try to kill you. My luck is such that I never hit the thing at which I aim. I meant to keep you safe.”

  “This is a strange tale,” she said. Slowly she smiled. “But perhaps true. Yes. You may accompany me home.”

  #

  We traveled all the rest of the day, but no sign of human habitation where we might overnight did we see, nor sign of aught else but the puissance of trees. In the dustier stretches of our way, I covered my face with a kerchief and let the others move ahead of me. After they had pulled too far ahead one time, Eudo rode back and urged me to take his horse and let him walk. Thrice I said him nay, but the fourth time I accepted his offer. Thereafter we traded the horse between us.

  In the stretches of stillness when I was like to be alone in the forest, I was sure I heard the sound of something not on our trail but somewhere nearby. Something pursued us, but not fast enough to overtake us. I rested my hand on the hilt of my dagger, which was hammered from sky iron, a bequest from my mother’s father and always lucky for me. Our pursuer never broke cover.

  When Sir Wulfric decreed we must stop for the night, I suggested we take watches. He grunted. “You watch first,” he said. I was near to falling down with exhaustion, but I shrugged and agreed.

  Eudo cooked a pot of porridge for us, dropping in dried apples and meat. The smell alone was heavenly, and the taste was ambrosial after all the dust I had eaten that day.

  The spring night turned chilly. I offered the damsel my best cape for her bed, and she accepted it. My second best cape was threadbare, torn in places, but good enough for a man who shouldn’t sleep through his watch.

  “Wake me when your head nods too often,” Eudo murmured to me. I told him I would.

  But withal I did not. Despite the chill and my determination, my grinding fear that the serpent had followed us and wanted to eat us in the dark, I fell asleep besi
de the ashes of our fire, and only woke when iron scraped stone.

  I startled up. All around me was darkness, for we were close in under the trees so that only a star or two glimmered between branches thick with young leaves. Then I saw a glow of green fire only a few feet from me. The monster’s eyes? I leapt to my feet. “What goes there?”

  Something clinked and clunked. I unsheathed my dagger. “Answer me,” I said.

  “Shh,” said something near the green flame.

  A hiss! Surely a serpent! My sky-iron knife outstretched, I started toward the noise, but tripped on one of the firestones where Eudo had cooked our dinner and fell headlong. My front smacked the ground. My breath flew out of me.

  “Fare you well?” asked a low voice.

  I waited till my breathing smoothed. What of the others? Had they heard my fall?

  Nothing else in our camp stirred. Small wonder if they were all tired after such a day.

  I groaned. “Not well, but not too ill.”

  Something knelt over me, tugged at my arm. I heard its breath, and knew from its size and sounds that it was no serpent. It helped me sit up.

  “Fare you well?” I asked Nix, for it could only be he by the size and familiarity of him.

  “My hunger overmastered me,” he whispered. “I smelled your supper. I sat amongst the trees as long as I could. Is there any left?”

  Eudo had sliced the cooled porridge into portions for tomorrow’s breakfast and wrapped them in linen, then hid them in a saddlebag against marauding vermin. I unbuckled the straps around the saddlebag and gave my morning portion to the boy, whose hunger was no doubt greater than mine.

  “Gramercy, noble knight,” he whispered after he had finished.

  “Here’s a change in tune."

  “How and I should insult one who has succored me?” Since he spoke in a whisper, I could not tell whether he mocked me.

  “How and you should lie? I thought it was a fault not in your character.”

  “For all I know, you may be noble, by birth if not by deed. In balance, you must be; you are a knight, are you not? And the very one who told me one must be noble-born to be a knight.”

  “I’m not the one who fashioned these laws. I imagine some time in the dim past it was not so; who was the first knight? I only tell you what I know to be true in the present day. There may be a way around this. Distinguish yourself with deeds so that the king hears of it, or sees it. If you display your prowess, he may elevate you, as was done in the romances of ages past.”

  The boy sighed. “Here’s a tale I would hear more of.”

  “Why not speak of it tomorrow?” muttered a voice from the darkness.

  “Eudo. Sorry we disturbed your rest,” I murmured.

  “Since I wake I may as well watch. What o’clock is it?”

  “There are not enough stars to say.” I yawned.

  “Well, well,” he grumbled, and sat up, a dim form in the darkness. “Rest you now. I’ll wake you later.”

  So Nix joined our company, by stealth, in dark of night, under my aegis.

  #

  In the morning Eudo and I drew the damsel away from our camp and spoke to her before Sir Wulfric woke.

  “The boy has rejoined us, and might stay, if we are careful,” I told the damsel.

  “The lad is as shy as a wild bird,” Eudo said. “The merest word might make him take flight.”

  “Please, as you value the boy’s life and his service to you, don’t point to him and call him savior,” I added. “Sir Wulfric is testy about such things and might take offense, and in so doing, harm the boy. He is a man of much wrath, quick to strike and powerful. Pretend the boy is only my squire; perhaps the knight won’t notice him then.”

  She frowned a mighty frown. “You would ask me to betray what I know as truth?”

  “No, no!” Eudo flapped his hands in the air.

  “Keep the truth in your heart, not on your lips,” I said. “Silence is all we ask.”

  She heaved a great sigh and nodded.

  So we went back, and some of us had cold porridge for breakfast. Sir Wulfric took no notice of the boy; in like manner he had never taken notice of servants at court.

  Another day we traveled, the boy and I to the rear. Sometimes he led his pony, and sometimes he rode it. I took out one of my willow whistles and tried to remember tunes from court, when I had breath to blow and there was not too much dust in my mouth. Nix listened closely, and sometimes whistled with his mouth when he caught a tune. I was more pleased than I had a right to be that he could carry a tune. Were we to stay together, music would add to our pleasure in each other’s company.

  Other times I told the boy about court life, and marvels I had heard, and ways that knights had earned glory. He had a great hunger for such stories.

  Just after we lost the sun, we fought free of the dark forest, and saw before us a fine castle built of black rock, surrounded by a moat of dark water, with torch light gleaming from some of the embrasures, and flickers of fire reflected on the water’s surface. A soldier strolled the wall walk above against the soft blue spring evening, then stopped to watch us.

  “God’s mercy. Tonight we will feast, and sleep with a roof over our heads,” said Sir Wulfric. He urged his horse to the drawbridge, which was down, and hailed the gatekeeper. “Who lives here? Will he give hospitality to two knights and a lady?”

  “It would be his honor to aid you,” said the gatekeeper, and stood aside so we could enter the inner courtyard

  Stable boys came to take our mounts. Eudo followed them to see that the stables were clean and well-stocked with hay, and that they took proper care of our horses, then joined us in the great hall.

  The lord and lady of the castle made us welcome. They were both handsome, though the brown of their hair had silvered over with age. The lady took our damsel away with her to wash somewhere else. The lord summoned servants to disarm us and to fetch ewers of warm water for us to wash, and they arranged for pallets to be laid by the fireplace, where we could later sleep. The boy would not let the servants touch his armor, and washed only his hands, leaving his face dirty. I opened my mouth to speak, and he glared at me with his honey-colored eyes.

  “Supper will be served directly,” said the lord after we had finished our ablutions. He showed us to table.

  Then they served us a marvelous meal, bread, wine, venison, salt to our tongues’ content, and asked that we share our story.

  At this Eudo and I exchanged glances, for who would tell a story that each of us knew variously? Would the lady speak her truth? Would the boy speak at all? Eudo and I had arranged that he sat farthest down the table from our hosts, for we knew he was untutored in manners, and hoped he would escape notice.

  The damsel began the tale. “I am Tegwen of Morcant.” She told how the serpent had ravished her away from her siege-embattled home in the north country, and how she had endured days as its hostage, and how knight after knight had come upon her and the serpent in the forest and tried to rescue her, but died in the attempt, and how finally we came and set her free.

  The lord and lady praised us.

  Sir Wulfric took up the tale. “I challenged the great beast! When it saw well what it would have to fight, it released the damsel and departed!” He smiled and stroked his mustache.

  Eudo and I stared anxiously at the boy. He sliced off a morsel of venison and ate it from the point of his knife, then drank wine from a silver goblet, and said nothing.

  “How fortunate that your fierceness inspired such fear in a creature more like to eat knights than run from them,” murmured the lady. Her brows drew together in confusion.

  “And now we are returning the damsel to her home,” I said before questions could be asked. “We hope to overcome the knight who is besieging her sister.”

  “Who is that knight?” asked the lord.

  “The Knight of the Pearl,” whispered the damsel.

  The lady blanched, and the lord straightened. “We have heard
of this perilous knight. His prowess is unmatched and his reputation is cruel. They say he hangs the bodies of those he defeats from trees so the ravens may sup, and leaves them there unburied, showing them greatest dishonor.”

  “He slew my father, after my father yielded to him,” I said. Fire kindled in my gut, fear and anger mixed. “All my life I have known I must face him.”

  “God protect you, then,” said the lord, and the lady murmured assent.

  I felt a heat against my face, and turned. The boy stared at me with his honey eyes, his face a fierce mask.

  “God protect me,” I repeated. For my mother’s grief, for my father’s dishonor, for my own purpose in life, I must go forward, though in my heart I knew there was no chance of victory for me. I would end up a hanging corpse, no doubt, which fate was better than to have all honorable knights laugh at me living.

  I turned from the boy’s gaze, and for a moment let my mind wander through my own dream of a future, one where I went armed only with my dagger and fiddle and whistles, and my treasury of stories and songs, and traveled not to battle but to entertain.

  “I will face this pearly knight too,” Sir Wulfric said, his voice hearty. “I search out adventure. I fear no knight. Sir Bran may have first battle with this knight to satisfy his honor. I will face him after, and I will beat him.”

  “But how unkind to say such a thing,” said the boy, “as though there were no chance Sir Bran might beat him.”

  “Hush,” I said. “He knows me well.”

  The boy gave me a scorching look such that it made me wonder where his thoughts had traveled.

  Eudo turned the subject to news from court, and we spoke no more about our future that night.

  #

  In the midst of the night, when the fire flickered low and the wine I had drunk whispered to me it was ready to quit me, I rose to find a latrine, of which I knew there were three in the walls off the great hall. I saw that two other pallets were as empty as mine, the boy’s and Eudo’s, so I took a taper, kindled a flame in the fire, and went to the farthest latrine, reckoning the closer two would be occupied. I came silent down the narrow crooked hall to the seat, and there beheld —